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I call out the next order without properly looking, my mind several streets away. Walking a route I’m not currently walking, beside someone who isn’t currently beside me.

“Latte for Dark!”

I say it before I’ve properly registered what I’ve written on the cup. The words are out. Loud, into a suddenly very quiet shop.

Nobody moves towards the counter. Nobody claims the drink. A woman near the window looks round, visibly startled, like she’s expecting something ominous to emerge from behind the pastry case.

Felix, halfway through steaming milk, stops dead. “There is no customer called Dark.”

“Oh,” I say helplessly. Of course there isn’t. And that’s such a shame.

Felix walks over to the finished drinks lined up on the counter and turns each cup around one by one.

Dark. Dark. Dark. Dark. Dark. Dark.

Six of them. All the same name. All in my handwriting, and I have no memory whatsoever of writing any of them. No memory of anything except the vague, persistent ache that’s been sitting behind my ribs since yesterday evening. The woman near the window is still watching us, thoroughly invested now. A man behind her mutters something to his companion about flash mobs and influencers.

“Oh,” I say.

“Oh,” Felix agrees.

Adam comes out of the stockroom with a box of coffee stirrers. He takes one look at the row of cups, one look at my face, and sets the box down very carefully, like the situation might get worse if he moves too fast.

“Stockroom,” Felix says. “Now.”

“I’m working,” I say, already turning back to the counter.

“You are naming customers after your boyfriend,” Felix says, pointing at the treacherous cups lined up on the counter. “Stockroom.”

The word boyfriend makes me wince, but I don’t argue. I don’t have it in me today. Felix steers me in and Adam pulls the door shut behind us. Now the three of us are standing here, wedged between the syrup bottles like it’s an actual crime scene.

“Talk,” Felix says.

“It’s a long story,” I say, stalling.

“We’re in a stockroom,” Felix says, arms folded. “On a Saturday. While there is a queue of customers. The quicker you start, the quicker you’ll finish.”

So I do. Magdalene, the university, the goats, the star on my arm. The bit about the Light being given a new name by an unsmiling, diminutive defeater of kings, which gets Felix going very still. Dark’s brother, the trouble in the Shadow Realm nobody’s explained properly yet. And then the pause. That we agreed to it. Both of us. Because it felt safer than pretending none of it was happening.

Felix doesn’t say anything for a second. Then, slowly, “Defeater of kings. Meaning me.”

“High Priestess Magdalene said it, not me,” I say.

“I met my boyfriend by trapping him in a summoning circle and now there’s a prophecy about it,” Felix says, faintly.

“In fairness, nothing about prophecies is ever standard,” I offer.

“Fair,” Felix concedes.

He picks up a syrup bottle, turns it over in his hands, and sets it back down. A stalling gesture. I recognise it because I do the same thing with cups.

“I don’t want it to be bad,” Felix says, quieter now, not quite looking at either of us. “Whatever it is. I’ve only just got him settled here. Lemon drizzles and trivia nights and a proper bed instead of a futon. I don’t want something from before to come and take that away from him.”

It’s the most honest thing I’ve heard Felix say about Dis, and it makes the whole thing feel considerably more real.

“Show me the mark,” he says.

I push my sleeve up. The star sits there, small and dark, exactly where it’s been since Magdalene found it. Adam leans in to look properly, and doesn’t say anything for a moment.